Chapter 19 #3
She found a kind of rhythm by the third trip.
By the fifth, she’d stopped thinking of what she was doing as something frightening and started thinking of it as a problem with a very specific solution.
Her magic was still mostly drained, but it turned out you didn’t need much magic to carry things carefully.
What you needed was steadiness and attention, and at least she still had that.
Malachi stayed near the corridor entrance, reading each object through its containment field before it was moved, confirming that its individual wards were holding.
He spoke quietly and continuously, giving her instructions and advisories, and she listened because he knew what he was talking about, and she knew he wanted her to come through this safely just as much as she did.
No trouble transporting the bone dice, and the astrolabe also wasn’t a problem.
Twelve of the other East Gallery objects went through that strange corridor and were deposited on the card table without incident.
By the time she picked up the glass jar, she was starting to develop a kind of cautious optimism about the whole operation.
But she knew at once that something was wrong. The jar’s energy felt different than it had that morning — more active, less settled — and she held it very carefully in both hands and sent a worried glance at Malachi.
“It’s reacting,” she said.
She’d barely finished speaking before he was next to her. He put his hand near the jar, not touching it, just reading it through proximity. The shift in his expression was subtle, but she could still see the worry there.
“The corridor’s dimensional energy,” he told her. “The weather-working inside is responding to it. The contained atmospheric pressure is attempting to equalize.”
Despite everything, she felt her mouth quirk. “Translation?”
“The jar wants to open.”
She stood there holding it while he worked through the calculation in his head. The whole time, she could feel the jar’s energy against her palms, a rhythmic pressure that definitely wasn’t settling down. “Can you reinforce the containment?”
“I need to add a secondary seal,” he said. “Hold still.”
She shot him an impatient look. “I am holding still.”
He placed both hands around hers, and his magic moved through the glass in a way she could feel even through her depleted sensitivity.
It was delicate and careful, the work he did on his most volatile objects.
Roslyn found herself frowning, since he’d promised her that he wouldn’t do significant magical work.
However, she decided against asking whether this qualified as significant, because the jar was actively trying to become a problem, and they didn’t have time for an argument about definitions.
The pressure in the glass eased. The energy inside it settled, pulled back from the edge it had been pushing against, and contained itself again.
Malachi lifted his hands. He was paler than he’d been ten minutes ago. That was saying something, considering how he hadn’t looked too great to begin with.
“Give me the jar,” he told her. “I’ll carry it myself.”
“You’re not supposed to — ” she began, but he shook his head as he broke in.
“I’m aware.” His eyes met hers, level and deliberate. “Give me the jar, Roslyn.”
So she gave him the jar.
He carried it through the corridor himself, walking slowly and with great care, and she watched him go with her hands at her sides and her heart doing worried little flip-flops beneath her ribs. He came back through two minutes later without the jar, and she let out a breath.
“The seal will hold,” he said. “The Jerome house has more stable dimensional conditions. The weather-working will settle once it’s been there for a few hours.”
“Good.” She picked up the next object. “Tell me when you need to stop.”
He gave her a look that said he wouldn’t be telling her when he needed to stop, so she arched an eyebrow, letting him know that she already knew that and was going to be watching him anyway, and they went back to work.
Roslyn had never been down to the vault before, partly because the place frightened her, and partly because Malachi would have given her massive amounts of grief if she’d tried to go there without his permission.
The stairs were narrow and the light was dim, cast by a couple of ancient incandescent bulbs that looked as if they wanted to give up the ghost at any moment.
The containment wards pressed against her from all sides the second she descended below ground level, denser than anything upstairs, layered on each other in a way that was almost tactile, like walking through heavy water.
She’d known intellectually that the basement objects were more dangerous.
But now that she stood among them and could feel their energy through the wards, she realized how dangerous they truly were.
There were thirty objects in the vault. Malachi described each one before it was moved, briefly and precisely, and she listened and carried and didn’t ask questions unless she needed to. This was his territory, and her job right now was to be useful and reliable…and to not drop anything.
The near-disaster happened on the fifteenth object.
It was a sealed iron box about the size of a hardcover book, and it contained something Malachi had described only as a stored compulsion of significant scope.
She didn’t know what that meant in practical terms, and she’d decided not to ask, mostly because she was fairly sure the answer would make the next twenty minutes harder.
She was two steps into the corridor with the iron box when the dimensional structure shifted around her.
Something about the air pressure seemed to change, the way you felt a storm front coming in, and out of nowhere, the corridor walls went unstable.
Her ears popped again, and the box in her hands grew uncomfortably warm.
That couldn’t be good.
“Stop,” Levi’s voice said from somewhere she couldn’t locate, calm and immediate. “Don’t move.”
Roslyn stopped immediately and wondered if she should also hold her breath.
The corridor walls seemed to bend and wave around her, not collapsing, but undulating like a kelp forest. The iron box was now almost uncomfortably hot, but she held it in both hands and stared straight ahead at the shimmer that marked the receiving end of the corridor, breathing evenly the whole time, the way you breathed when a patient was crashing and you knew panicking wouldn’t help anyone.
Then the walls steadied, and the pressure normalized. The box in her hands began to cool.
A droplet of sweat inched its way down her back, but she made herself walk the rest of the way through. Once she was in Jerome, she set the box down on the folding table with trembling hands and stood there for a moment with her eyes closed.
“What the hell was that?” she demanded after she was safely back on the Astoria side of the corridor.